Pat Howard: Redeeming Penn State requires humbling its football program

Pat Howard

July 29, 2012 07:33 AM

Pat Howard

July 29, 2012 07:33 AM

The Associated Press moved a story a few days ago detailing concerns among Batman aficionados about what the massacre in that Aurora, Colo., theater would mean for the movie and comics franchise.

The obvious answer: Who gives a damn?

After spending the better part of a week processing the sanctions imposed Monday on Pennsylvania State University and its football program, I'm having a hard time caring any more about football than Batman.

The NCAA set out to create a cautionary tale, and it succeeded. But the really important thing is not -- never -- losing sight of what college athletics and those who fixate on them are being cautioned against.

For us Penn State alumni and others with ties to the university, the landing from this fall hurts more because it started on a pedestal. We were better than the rest.

There's been plenty of scandal in big-time college football, but nothing like this. Those other schools were harboring cheats and opportunists. Penn State was shielding a monster.

I've been sampling the objections of some of the faithful to penalties that will knock Penn State, perhaps permanently, from its familiar place among the elite college football programs. There's been a predictable mix of thoughtful and clueless, sad and angry.

There's nothing to be done about the threads of denial and warped priorities from people desperate to cling to their illusions. Human nature frequently isn't pretty when ugly events force inconvenient value judgments.

But also reflected in various forums has been an encouraging unwillingness to push the atrocities against children to the margins and change the subject back to football.

Those people reject the cover of abstraction and rationalization. They remind us that whatever the penalties, they can't begin to repay what Jerry Sandusky and his enablers stole from those little boys.

We can't purge the world of evil people who prey on children. But we can and must rage against and punish any abuse of authority that shields those predators, whatever the reason, and leaves them in a position to do it again and again.

What happened at Penn State is rooted in the volatile mix of power, money and values at the highest level of college football. So a reckoning that lays low the pride, cash and laurels that were put ahead of humanity and decency won't draw a quarrel from me.

One objection I understand is that the NCAA's sanctions punish athletes and other students who had no part in the crimes and cover-up. I consider that in the frame of reference from my own long-ago days in Happy Valley.

Penn State won the national championship in my senior year, in 1982, and I was all in. I was an adherent to the cult of Joe Paterno in those days, though his unwillingness to let go in later years gave me pause.

So I get the regret that students won't experience that piece of the Penn State experience at the same wattage I and so many others did. But the punishment seeks to teach a very large and powerful institution a vital lesson, and in that there's a teachable moment for students about what's really important.

I doubt my younger self would have fully appreciated that lesson if this hammer had fallen during my days at Penn State. But I would have taken it with me just the same.

General McLane High School graduate Drew Astorino finished out his fine Penn State football career last fall amid the mushrooming scandal and the firing of Paterno. The NCAA's decision to vacate 14 seasons of Penn State victories has largely wiped Astorino's teams from the record books.

In comments last week to Erie Times-News columnist John Dudley, Astorino joined those who believe it's unfair that fallout from the cover-up is being visited on today's and tomorrow's players and coaches. Fair enough. But it struck me that Astorino said he drew his conclusions without having read the evidence laid out by former FBI Director Louis Freeh.

Reading the Freeh report is indispensable to the argument for why sanctions that have major and lasting effects on Penn State football and its culture are not only appropriate, but necessary. The imperatives of penance and perspective will be reinforced by the coming seasons of shared humility on the field and in the stands at Beaver Stadium.

What happened to those little boys happened in the deep shadows thrown by a fabled football program that outgrew its proper place. Cutting that program down to size is essential to, little by little, restoring the light.